This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.
A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.
I’m here as a kind of halfway house—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.
All of the things are blooming. Have you noticed? June is here. The Cecil Brunner rosebush is magnificent this year--an explosion of flowers so heavy that its top has fallen away from the white wall of the little city cottage where Lucia is made, and is spilling toward the alleyway. There is a lesson here for me, in expectation and fruition...
Sunday, April 9, 2017 - Daily Notes, From the Editor (550 words). Whoa, April is intense. Burgeoning. This thing we call Spring is aptly named. To the untrained eye, new growth appears suddenly, but if you have been paying attention you know: this all started long ago.
Happy New Year! Oh, the plans I had for ending 2016 with a neat bow, a perfect email, and an announcement of a new offering I've been working on for early 2017. Out the window they flew sometime in the last week while I struggled to balance heart work with paid work, dreams with reality. Instead, I woke this morning unfinished. Like I always do...
In order for rose hips to develop, one must leave her roses on the bush and avoid the temptation to cut them off mid-summer. She must be willing accept that they will go through a phase of crinkling brown. She must teach herself to love this uncomfortable season of transformation as much as she loved the promise of new buds in May and those soft pink petals in June...
May 13, 2016 - Daily Notes, From the Editor
“Things take longer than we think”
What I often fail to account for are the transitions. The time it takes to move from one state of being to another is not inconsequential, nor is it swift; especially when one is moving from her thinking brain down into the wiser space of her heart.
Earning a living as a public relations consultant for innovative companies while working toward creating this dream of Lucia, I encounter transition on a daily basis. My day timer has slots for every thirty minute period of the day, and I learned long ago that organization is not as simple as fitting my list of tasks neatly inside those lines. It is difficult to move back and forth between thinking-tasks and feeling-tasks more than once a day. It takes time to drop into the heart space.
Transitions often require more time and energy than the tasks that lie between them.
On a slow day, I send 60-75 emails. I receive more than 150 (not counting email for Lucia). Each one is a decision. Keep? Delete? Read? Respond? If so, how quickly? Is it urgent? What to say? How do I convey what I mean efficiently, effectively, professionally? Anyone who makes a living communicating on email will understand what I mean at the end of the day when I sigh, "My brain is so tired."
Someone I love recently said, "I'm not very good at multi-tasking." Oh, baby, none of us are. It is the stuff of crazy-making. Yet we go around pretending like it is possible and we allow those who claim it as a mark of their superiority to convince us they have more intelligence, more drive, more talent than we do. But the truth is they do not. No one can be fully present in two places at once. Our brains and our hearts are connected, yes. They are also different locations with different functions. Getting back to the heart takes time, but it is the more powerful place to inhabit.
The roses are blooming now.
Outside my office and living room windows they make the gentlest slow-motion explosion. It started as a mass of tiny buds. Now, soft pink blooms climb this sweet farmhouse like something straight out of a fairytale.
Today is Friday, and I marked the moment of transition from week to weekend by stopping to stand beneath them. I smelled every one I could reach, noticing how its own scent was slightly different from the others. I whispered, "I love you," because I do. I closed my eyes and touched the leaves and petals. I breathed.
Thoughts slid slowly from my brain downward into the well of my moving heart. It slowed. I listened to the beats and for a moment could not tell if the rhythm belonged to me, or to the rosebush. Maybe it was a two-part harmony.
An hour later I am back at my desk, still transitioning. If all goes well, this shift from week-brain to weekend-heart will only take about twelve more hours. Quiet music from Patty Griffin on Pandora soothes my psyche, coaxing the progression downward with an easy rhythm that entrains with my pulse, just like the roses did.
These things take time: Making a living. Loving another person. Creating a new magazine. Building a team. Cultivating a tribe. Helping raise a child. Composing a life. Everything does, really.
Whatever you are working toward, know this: It will take longer than you think. There will be transitions. And they, as much as any other passage on your life's journey, are where beauty and meaning and vitality are waiting. Breathe in. Drop down. Stop thinking. Start feeling. Smell the roses.
Happy Friday.
xo
laura
December 17, 2015
It's raining today and I am in the process of changing. Moving from one state of being to another. In transition. Maybe you are too? It's not easy. I've heard there is no way out, though. Only through.
Uncertainty about seemingly big things like love life, future potential, purpose, worth, success and failure...the precariousness of an identity can be scary to put into words. And I love words.
But lately I've been painting.
One watercolor a day. or two, or three. Or none. When I am moved. When my heart swells with emotion that I know is both temporary and important, fleeting and indelible. That is when I paint.
It only takes ten minutes. A break from the work day. I push the brush across paper and watch the color stain. I let go of logic and reason and even words in order to sense how colors will blend, in order to express the inexpressible.
I understand what they mean when they say that art heals. It doesn't fix, though. Maybe healing is not about fixing at all. Maybe healing is transition.
It's raining today and I am in the process of changing. I've heard there is no way out. Only through.
xo
Laura
p.s. a little update on issue two : it's done. well, done in the sense that i finally stopped editing and sent it to karly to review for design. it took a full six months longer than i expected. i am learning. soon, we will send it to the printer. i can not wait to share this beauty with you all, especially our incredible indiegogo contributors. big love.